1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to the field of information access and display. In particular, the invention describes a method and apparatus for browsing structured objects such as stories.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer systems can now access many types of information from many different sources. However, presenting that information in a coherent manner to a user has become a challenging task. A user, using a standard personal computer, can access information, such as stories, from many services. For example, video stories and audio stories can be accessed from CNN Headline News, text stories can be accessed from Associated Press' news wire. The stories can include text, photos, video clips, and audio clips. Presenting this information to the user in a manner that allows easy review has not been adequately addressed by prior art systems.
Some prior art systems operate like an electronic mail browser. Stories are presented in a simple list. A user selects a story by clicking on a title of a story. The body of the story is then displayed in a separate window. The user loses his or her sense of context, and his or her focus having to look from the titles of the stories window to the full text window. This makes browsing difficult for the user.
Other systems have provided a newspaper like layout for the user. Headlines and at least the beginning of the story are displayed. However, this limits the number of stories that can be put on a page because screen real estate is limited in most display devices. Therefore, users find it difficult to browse a great number of stories in such a system. Also, the display has an undesirable crowded and cluttered look to it.
In other systems, such as the help features in some software such as the balloon help supported in the Apple Macintosh, the computer displays some text when a user moves a cursor over an item on the display screen. However, this is all the information that is presented to the user. Typically, in such systems the user cannot easily access more information on the topic. Such a system does not work well for information that supports more than two levels of abstraction, such as stories. For example, a story can be broken into a title, a summary of the story, and then the rest of the story.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and apparatus that allows a user to easily browse objects that support multiple levels of information such as stories.